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Jannak

Doom user content as Physical medium? (Megawads, gameplay mods, etc)

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Eversince I've read this new article, I thought to myself that maybe there's a way to further preserve all this Doom user generated content history in physical format like in CDs and such?

 

Like imagine if Megawads like Hell Revealed 1&2, Memento Mori, Requiem, Alien Vendetta, Eternal Doom, Scythe 1&2, etc got physical copies and I imagine what their CD covers would look like and especially ZDoom gameplay mods as well?

 

Thing is I think that there needs to be some physical formats of these media stored in a library archive to ensure it's history doesn't get lost especially just in case something happens to the internet itself in the far future?

Edited by Jannak

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Don't optical disks (CDs, DVDs, etc) start degrading after 25 years? I like the idea but I think it needs a better choice of medium.

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I did some preliminary planning to do a physical "made in my basement" physical presentation of AV but I got lazy and didn't want to deal with the logistics of a payment system. Not to make a profit off of (not counting artwork, investment is like $1 per sleeve/disc/label), but shipping would have to be covered by the buyer. But yeah, laziness.

 

As far as preservation of data for generations, that's a different and so far unsolved concept. None exist as far as I know, they are only as good as the steward who takes care of them - e.g. tape media has "bleed through" if spooled up too long, vinyl is lossy from the act of playing, hdds have moving parts and industry changing interfaces as time moves forward, and so on. Etching on stone will get you a few thousand years, though!

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2 hours ago, NoXion said:

Don't optical disks (CDs, DVDs, etc) start degrading after 25 years? I like the idea but I think it needs a better choice of medium.

Well, vynil has better audio quality and probably better graphics 

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3 minutes ago, cambreaKer said:

didn't action doom have a physical release?


More or less, there are ten copies, or so, which weren‘t free available.

 

Part two got what you can call a physical release of hundred copies.

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The idea that these ever would get lost is very far fetched.

There is hundreds of people who have these files archived. There is even few archived versions of the whole idgames on archive.org if you want to easily download tons of stuff.  obviously lots of wads have already been lost forever, mostly because they were on some weird site that no longer exists or the author simply wanted to delete them.

 

You could burn some cd's of your own of course if you really need a backup that is not on a hdd. 

 

In the end not a single storage medium lasts forever so you're going to have to keep creating backups as time goes on. 

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4 hours ago, NoXion said:

Don't optical disks (CDs, DVDs, etc) start degrading after 25 years? I like the idea but I think it needs a better choice of medium.

USB flash drives are becoming smaller and cheaper, like 4 bucks for a 16GB one.

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6 hours ago, NoXion said:

Don't optical disks (CDs, DVDs, etc) start degrading after 25 years?

 

I don't think there's a specific timeframe beyond which CDs begin to degrade. It depends on how well you take care of your CDs more than anything else.

 

26 minutes ago, NoXion said:

 

That article talks about SSDs, not flash drives. They're two completely different things.

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13 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

 

I don't think there's a specific timeframe beyond which CDs begin to degrade. It depends on how well you take care of your CDs more than anything else.

 

 

That article talks about SSDs, not flash drives. They're two completely different things.


It's not clear, but this page (https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4/) by the Council on Library and Information Resources cites NIST as estimating the lifespan of DVD-Rs at about 30 years, which is pretty close to my earlier guess.

According to this page (https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-difference-between-ssd-and-flash-hard-drives/), modern SSDs use Flash technology. The wiki article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Flash-based_SSDs) appears to corroborate this.

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15 hours ago, Jannak said:

Thing is I think that there needs to be some physical formats of these media stored in a library archive to ensure it's history doesn't get lost especially just in case something happens to the internet itself in the far future?

Well, technically, every single copy of the /idgames archive on the 'net is already stored on some physical medium.

For example, archive.org has several copies, and I'm assuming these guys are experts in preserving data for the maximum amount of time.

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The idea of physical mediums is too hoarder mentality driven. I can get terabytes of storage for almost nothing in DigitalOcean, AWS and Google Cloud. Also Azure and whatever other cloud services exist. This storage will continue to exist as the maintainers of the actual physical media and servers transfer, update, and replace the disks and storage used. I can mirror it inside these systems across data centers all over the world. “But how can you trust the cloud?” I can trust 3 or 4 behemoth tech companies redundantly hosting 90% of the Internet, and a few GB of Doom wads, across different physical regions of the world much more than I’d trust someone with a stack of bestbuy hard drives or CD-Rs :) And the cost at this point would frankly be negligible. And the distribution is baked in, free terabytes of transfer, just make the buckets public and let people dig through ugly auto-generated file index pages.

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11 minutes ago, insertwackynamehere said:

stuff

 

the whole point of preserving [x] is taking "trust" out of the equation. Your solution is subject to all the physical problems that a hobby preservationist would encounter, but adds two problems on top: service no longer profitable and shuts down, service vulnerable to attack. 

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It’s not though. Unless a hobby preservationist is running multi-million dollar data centers, they aren’t comparable. If any of these big three cloud providers are to shut down it will be a multi-year long process with tons of notice. And while attack is possible, the idea behind multiple physical locations reduces the probability of acts of violence and war wiping you out and multiple providers reduces the probability of hacking. If every cloud service is fully pwned simultaneously as tons of coordinated attacks cause bombs go off in 5 different continents leveling data centers then yeah maybe things would be bad.

 

If your concern is end times long term archival for some future alien race or a rebirth of humanity post-apocalyptic bottleneck then sure, maybe cloud services can’t be trusted but neither can some random individual with a stack of low quality Memorex CD-Rs.

 

Anyone super concerned with this stuff should put $100-200 a year towards what I’m describing and create their own mirror of wads in multi-region buckets on multiple billion-dollar cloud providers and they will make more of an impact than hoarding data in their house due to some OCD need for physical copies. If 5 members of the Doom community did this you’d have so much redundancy whether due to members becoming disinterested and bailing, members getting owned due to bad password and 2FA practices, cloud providers going down, data centers being bombed, etc, that it simply would not be worth worrying about.

 

And voila, that’s pretty much what Id games mirrors already are AFAIK (although from an era long before mainstream cloud providers) and those have worked well for decades.

 

Cheap hard drives and burned CDs are not a solution to this problem and I think the idea is born out of neuroticism which is why I’m so averse to it. It’s not just harmless it’s a waste of time and mental energy to panic about data disappearing and then spending resources and time on doing nothing except quelling some irrational fear about bits needing to be cradle-able in some medium you can touch.

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10 minutes ago, insertwackynamehere said:

Cheap hard drives and burned CDs are not a solution to this problem

 

No one is arguing otherwise. Dunno why you insist on insulting everyone on the planet who collects anything that they have brain damage. Personally I'm not worried about the "data problem" in regards to doom files, we have enough crackpot collectors and archive hosts and ultra-popular files that exist on tens of thousands of user machines, and I have my own personal favorites backed up. But arguing that the cloud is the end of any concerns about data preservation, and anyone who doesn't use it has ocd, is fucked

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The topic of this thread and the majority of discussion is about using Best Buy level personal computing technology to long-term archive data into some physical device under the misguided idea it’s not safe and sound until you do.

 

If that’s your starting point, I’m pointing out that you’re better off with cloud solutions for the same price point and technological prowess.

 

Anyone past that point in terms of understanding and money and whatever isn’t going to need my advice in this thread in the first place. I’m discussing the topic at hand, I just happen to think it’s very misguided and wrong so I’m not agreeing with the initial sentiment and pointing out why it’s wrong.

 

Your idea of trust like the cloud can’t be trusted but a CD created for burning playlists to with 0 integrity guarantees can be trusted or a consumer hard drive constructed for 5 years of personal computing use and nothing else can be trusted is just basically rooted in the idea that holding a physical medium adds bonus points to its integrity/archival potential which is emotional not matter of fact.

 

Maybe you are thinking of something else but this thread is clearly about personal archival solutions for people who are giving undue weight to the long term integrity of personal use solutions meant for things like short term “my computer crashed” backups.

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OP had two topics, one was regarding the satisfaction factor of owning a physical object with artwork and whatnot, then a followup wonder/musing about the concept of future preservation of data. In my initial reply I shit on all physical media as temporary in nature, where are you getting that I'm an advocate for anything otherwise? There was the one guy suggesting usb thumbdrives which was pretty silly, I'll give you that

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Fair enough I see now your posts before are pretty much in agreement with me regarding the transient nature of personal backup solutions.

 

I was just seeing the first post on the thread and a sort of sentiment about DIY futile backup “solutions” and got preemptively defensive about anyone wasting their time and money using burned CDs and consumer-grade external drives in a misguided bid to assist with archival preservation.

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Well, i think redundancy is the best way to go about preserving the files if you're worried about losing them. Save a backup of idgames or your favorite wad collection in some flash drives and cloud storage service providers and you won't lose anything unless the world is nuked

 

edit: just remembered idgames mirrors exist so... yeah just saving your favorite wads in you personal pc and some storage service should be good enough?

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